My opinion is that the unbridled banning and other mod "abuse" is what killed Zoklet.
That was also a huge part of it, but just as huge a part of it was the posting of utter attention-whoring garbage in thread after thread, year after year. People would come in and scroll through shit tons of utterly useless and uninteresting crap and even comment frequently about how truly shitty the "content" was. This business of minimizing what the kidiots did to our communities is also truly sad. To witness what they did not just once, but twice, and still sit there and deny the outright poisoning of the content with useless spam on both boards is just the height of ridiculous at this point. People would comment all the time about the terrible quality of the posts on both &Totse and Zoklet, and that's because they were jam packed with 12 year olds just looking for an ICQ-chat-Lite experience to satiate their own dumb asses. It wasn't about knowledge is power, it was about posting the most useless, uninteresting, illegible shit one could imagine.
I don't think anyone here is advocating that we be allowed to spam the whole board with garbage. I, personally, am just agitating for looser rules regarding SG and HB. Keep the spam in one of two places, to allow 'shitposters' the illusion of choice, and I bet you half the bitching around here would die down instantly.
Sort of like how a mirror makes a room look bigger, or a smaller hand around your dick makes it look bigger, illusion satisfies people in subtle and magical ways.